Film Lesson-"The Right Stuff"

Over the years the United States and Russia been going at it. From nuclear bombs to forming alliances. Even sending someone to the moon. This was known as the "space race". In the movie "The Right Suff", the Russians unfortunatley beat us with getting a satellite up into space, and the first man. We got the first monkey into space. We were like a joke to all nations. But, we also were the first to get a man to orbit the Earth and more than once. Since we were only th efirst to get a monkey into space the Russians had technically won the space race. The scene I would always remember is the monkey going up to space. It was hilarious but, a key moment in history.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

During the 1960's the world came very close to having a nuclear war. Actually it was the closet. But we were lucky to avoid it thanks to two extraordinary brave men. John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Around 1962 America was leading in the arms race against Russia drastically. Because their missiles only were strong enough to hit the U.S but, our missiles were able to take out the whole Soviet Union. So around April of that year Khrushchev of the Soviet Union got an idea to put missiles on Cuba, which would've of helped Fidel Castro defend himself from the U.S's potential attack. So in the summer of 1962 the Soviet Union builttheir missiles on Cuba.
Everything went wrong on October fifteenth when some photographs revealed the missiles being built on Cuba. The U.S. then quickly found out about the Soviets plans. President Kennedy demanded that the Soviets remove their missiles from Cuba. The first major step he took was he issued a naval quarantine to stop the Soviet missiles from entering Cuba. Next we went into "safe mode". There were reconnaissance missions almost every two hours. These reconnaisance missions were just to make sure that no missiles were being planned to be fired. On October 28th it was basically over, the Soviet Union agreed to take their missles out of Cuba and the U.S agreed not to attack Cuba.

NATO and The Warsaw Pact

This picture is an anti-Nato ad. Which reads "Hello, NATO!"

NATO was an alliance of different militaries against communism. It stood for North Atlantic Treaty Organization. During the Cold War era there were only twelve different countries and or nations. The U.S, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Denmark, Iceland, Italy Norway Portugal, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The only real reason for the formation of NATO was DEFENSE. So that if one of them were attacked all of the other countries in NATO would come to their aide as one. Around this time we were having problems with Russia. So as a answer or threat to NATO they created their own "NATO" called the Warsaw Pact. But, they were still out number with just 8 nations. The Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.